hi there. i am running debian's stable codenamed Sarge. i followed the tutorial from http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21 about installing a new kernel. after that when i boot the system to the new kernel all i get is: VFS: cannot open root device "hda5" or unknown-block (0,0) please append a correct "root=" boot option kernel panic - not syncing : VFS :unable to mount root fs on unknown -block(0,0)
Is your root FS built into the kernel. Had the same problem with 2.6.8. Adding initrd.img-2.6.8 to menu.lst didn't help, just leaded to the next error: /dev/console not found. I think that the solution to my problem was - compiling the root filesystem (where / is mounted, for me it was ext3) support in the kernel. I am not 100% sure, because I changed kernel .config quite alot, but I think that this was the main problem. P.S. Maybe I'm wrong. but then again.. maybe im not. Hope this helps someone.
